ACLU: Camera maker Flock systematically lies to governments and police

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has published an analysis of the conduct of Flock Safety — a company that installs automated license-plate recognition (ALPR) cameras for law enforcement agencies across the country. The advocates' conclusion is simple: time and again, Flock misleads and outright deceives the very people it sells its services to.

A record set in a single day

In April, the city council of Oshkosh, Wisconsin was reviewing a contract with Flock. One council member asked whether the system builds “heat maps” of a specific vehicle's movements. The company's chief information security officer assured them it did not. The contract was approved — and by the very next morning it turned out this was a lie. The council reconvened and rescinded its decision. Deputy Mayor Joe Stephenson remarked that he didn't understand how you could make decisions when your vendor lies to you. And so a record was set: only one day passed between approval and termination of the Flock contract. The company later admitted that the system does in fact store a map of the points where a vehicle was recorded for up to a month, but called the episode a “slight miscommunication” and a “minor nuance.”

Not an isolated case

The ACLU lists other episodes as well. In Colorado, Flock assured the Loveland police chief that federal agencies had no access to the data, and its CEO publicly denied the existence of federal contracts — until agreements with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) came to light. A separate corporate blog post headlined “Does Flock share data with ICE? No” said nothing about the fact that the immigration service was gaining indirect access through the company's local-police clients.

After reports that the system had been used in Texas to track down a woman who had traveled to Illinois for an abortion, Flock rolled out a tool for verifying the reasons behind a search. According to an investigation by the ACLU of Massachusetts, the safeguard doesn't work: officers enter vague reasons like “investigation” or “susp” into the field. At one Oregon department, the word “investigation” was entered 111 times in September 2025, while “hehehe” was entered twenty times.

Lies about the ACLU itself

What particularly stung the advocates was that Flock claimed a partnership with the ACLU — both during debate over a bill in New Mexico and, back in 2021, at a meeting of the Urbana city council in Illinois. The ACLU stresses: neither the organization nor any of its affiliates ever worked with Flock on the design of ALPR systems.

The advocates' conclusion is categorical: reputable government bodies should not do business with a company that routinely misleads the public, officials, and its own clients. And if they aren't prepared to give up the cameras, the ACLU urges them to at least impose strict limits on how long data is retained, how it is shared, and the list of crimes it may be used to investigate.

Source: Hacker News